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[TheBerg15]

I have a large river that runs through my land and then splits into two rivers around my fort.  I then channeled a moat to close off the other side. The problem is that I have a couple of dwarves that have died in my moat and river that are now haunting the fortress and so I want to somehow drain the river by putting a dam at the start of it.  I cant figure out how to do this because I cant build things in the river.
I was thinking that I could maybe build a bridge and then stockpile some rocks on top and then retracting the bridge.  Would that work by droping enough rocks in there that it would eventually block it?

[FrankMcFuzz]

You can just create a slab to memorialize the dead dwarves so that you don't need to fetch the corpses.

As for the blocking, your retracting idea wouldn't work, it would just waste perfectly good stone trap ammo.

Try constructing walls along where you want to dam off, then dropping the constructed walls into the river, should block it off, but I'm not an expert in the matter. My only attempts failed. If you can temporarily dam or freeze it, you can get in there and use raising drawbridges to cut off the flow.

[NecroRebel]

The method you describe will be completely ineffective.

There's several ways to dam rivers. The easiest probably isn't an option for you or you wouldn't have asked, and that is to simply wait until it freezes and construct the dam while the river is ice. The second-easiest is to use the Moses effect. Make a bridge out of constructed floors across the whole river, build a wall of pumps on it so that they all pump towards the place where the river flows out from, and then turn them on. The pumps will basically reverse the river's flow, making it run in a loop, and the river bed behind the pump wall will slowly dry. The last possible method is to pump magma up and then pour it out onto the river to make a cast-obsidian dam.

Once you have the river dammed, I'd suggest you build a line of drawbridges across it that you link to a lever. That way, if or when you remove or disable the initial dam, you can easily just pull the drawbridge lever to block the river again.

Edit: FrankMcFuzz's suggestion will also be completely ineffective. Constructed walls deconstruct when caved in, thus his method would result in loose stones or blocks falling into the river, which don't block anything.

[FrankMcFuzz]

Aw dam (hurhurhurhur I did a pun.)

[TheBerg15]

thanks a lot